


first times

by rockatansky



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-27
Updated: 2015-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-06 11:27:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4219962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockatansky/pseuds/rockatansky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wonders if there really are Gods out there, and if they knew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	first times

The first time she catches him staring at her, she thinks nothing of it. 

He is fresh from the desert, flinchy and raw like an open nerve, with sand at his hairline and dirt filling the deep crevices of his skin. You can never be rid of the Wasteland, she knows, no matter how many times you try and scrub it from yourself, and sometimes she thinks that he is a personification of the shifting dunes themselves. 

When people ask him questions, words rarely fall past his lips and his replies often come in the form of sounds alone. Grunts. Hums. Little nods and blinks and never,  _never_ does he meet their excited, awed gazes.

Except when she fixes him with a steady look, he does not turn away. His eyes shine bright from under thick lashes and tangled hair. She wonders if he sees the memories, memories she has been too busy to dwell on, memories of those few days, reflected in her own gaze - brought up from the depths of her mind by his return and aching like a fresh wound. 

She does not make him ask.

"You can stay."

His tongue darts out to wet chapped lips, to open up his ragged and unused throat.

"Thank you."

-

The first time she catches herself staring at him is not long enough after.

Round a fire, on one of the Citadel's peaks, the Sisters gather to tell stories - stories born during their new daily routines, tales borrowed from wandering among the People Below. She does not always join these meetings, and rarely does she add input of her own, but they are always glad of her company. 

Tonight, for the first time, Max is with them.

The stars are brighter than usual, she notices, and are clear in the smog-less sky. Dag's stomach is full and round now, so she has not drank from the flask of Moonshine that is making its route of the circle, but Furiosa's insides are warm from it and the rest of the girls have started to giggle and flush. Cheedo is barely able to relate the antics of a Pup that she's been caring for in the Hospital, her words continually interrupted by the squeals of the others, and Furiosa finds a smirk resting on her own lips. 

Nobody else is alert enough to notice the rumble of laughter from within his chest that escapes during a particular climax in the tale, but she does, and it has her eyes wandering over the fire to him. The flames cast a flickering, orangish light on his features - and she sees him, she thinks, truly, for the first time. The arch if his brows, the twitch of his mouth, lips wet and sweetened with Moonshine. His eyes, varnished by the fire and could have gold in them, in this light. Not that it matters: what hits her, really, is how they remain steady on the girls as they cackle and fidget. 

Steady on her when he finally senses her gaze and meets it.

She'd first seen him chained to the front of a war vehicle, muzzled and bleeding and  _mad_ , but even with the fight and the dust surrounding them, she had still seen him. And he had seen her. Although neither of them had realised it at the time, that was a moment they would never come back from. 

He is so different now, here, under the stars. He looks at her like he did when he'd left, before he had vanished among the throng - with understanding and crystal clarity.

She is different too, she realises - maybe not so dramatically, at least not on the outside, but it feels like her soul has been scrubbed and scrubbed until the dirt and the blood dissolved and left a new woman behind. She owes him for it, yet the idea does not make her uncomfortable. Although she would deny it until her voice was hoarse, he owes her too 

It is the first time she smiles at him. And he has the decency to not look shocked, or surprised, and simply gives her a smile in return.

-

The first time he touches her, she has been aching for it.

The sun beats down so that even inside the walls of the Citadel the air hangs heavy and hot. She is anxious for no reason, everyone is, everyone is held together by a thread of tension that is spooling from an unknown source, and that just makes her feel worse.

When Dag collapses in a shadowed corridor, she wonders if there really are Gods out there, and if they knew.

She must shout for help, but she doesn't hear herself, and yet here are the girls, running and surrounding their white haired sister as she convulses. She's too large, Furiosa's been thinking, too round for such a fragile spine and such thin legs.

"Is she bleeding?" Someone asks, she thinks it could be Toast but they are all the same, and she cannot stay there any longer.

Max finds her in the Vault. It has remained untouched and unapproachable since the Return. A few of the boys had detached the metal door to be melted down for scrap, had collected the scarce belongings within that were requested, but neither herself or the girls had found a reason to come back. Until now.

She hears him enter, hears him breathe in the only cool air in the whole of the Citadel today, hears him trail fingers over the dusty, abandoned piano keys. She remains staring at the words on the wall - faded, but not forgotten by any of them. It is silent, and still, when she murmurs,

"They were so...old. When you looked into their eyes. Older than they should have been."

He does not say anything, just waits. Her fingers reach out, as if to brush the paint.

"They should not have had to think things like this.

"Shouldn't have ever had to go through the things they did.

"They were children, Max."

It's not the first time she's said his name, but it is the first time she's addressed him directly, and he lets out a long breath.

"So were you."

Her eyes sting, and she can't turn to him, even though she knows he understands, she just can't let him see - a small subconscious aspect of her refusing to show weakness. She's always found Cheedo's title as 'fragile' so bitterly amusing, just because it was so far from the truth. None of them were anything but strong, to be able to stay alive in this place. Weakness was not tolerable here. If you were weak, fragile, you did not survive.

He makes it obvious as he comes up behind her. Makes it clear what he is doing when he shifts and gently, gently reaches out to touch her shoulder. He knows. She realises then  _just how much_  and it fills her with a swell of something indescribable that sits heavy in her chest and stomach. His touch burns through her clothes and through her skin and she wants it to engulf her like hellfire.

"She'll be okay. She's doing fine."

She turns to him, then, and drowns in the look in his eyes.

He's right, in the end. The birth is "ridiculously, stupidly painful" but it's a birth. The baby has two healthy lungs and a beating heart, but Furiosa nearly sobs from the irony because it only has one good arm, the other a twisted and useless knot.

It's also a female, and when she enters the little room, she finds the Sisters sitting in silence with hands clasped and tears streaming down their faces. Dag just cradles her little girl and whispers "thank you" over and over and over.

- 

The first time she touches him feels like salvation.

She grabs him by the scruff of his shirt, pulls him, let's him round her up against the wall. Let's him cradle her hips with his rough hands as he yields to her tongue and her teeth and her lips. Cups his face, fingers half curled into the hair at the nape of his neck, and feels his own hands desperately bunch into her shirt. A ragged breath escapes his mouth and she drinks it up. A conversation with Toast swims to mind, about how, according to a few of her books, some in the old world saw lust as impure and blasphemous. If this is sin, she thinks, she will thank the devil himself for the softness of Max's lips.

He is so  _noisy_. Panting and whimpering and murmuring against her skin. She revels in it - knows this is the side of him that only she gets to see, and grinds her hips against his own just to make him whine again.

And again.

And again, until he is tugging gently and impatiently at her like a child, murmuring if it's alright... can they just... can they  _please_  move to the bed, and she  _laughs_ with the joy of it because out of all the men in this fractured and brittle wasteland, hers is one that  _asks_.

He beams at the sound, and is still grinning foolishly as she reminds him he needs to take his clothes off. Then he is just nodding and nodding and working at his belts and buckles and cloth with eyebrows furrowed in the same look of concentration he gets when under the bonnet of a car, and she just laughs again. Cannot stop, even as she undoes her prosthetic and shrugs her own shirt off, because she feels weightless and giddy and does not want the lightness to end.

He steps out of his trousers and pulls her on top of him, onto the bed. He is so warm - his bare skin flushed under the weathered tan - and she rakes her nails down his chest just to see what noise he makes. The moan is so filthy that it hits her straight in the gut, and she is soon fumbling at the laces of her trousers. It's frustrating, she can't get it done quick enough with only one lot of heavily trembling fingers, and he must see it because he's instantly reaching up to help her. And isn't this just how they work, how they've always worked? She need only consider something for a second and he is acting on it, like two complementing parts of the same engine. 

Shucking her pants off and tightening her bare thighs around his hips. Feeling his grip slide up to her ribs. Should be clinical, frightening - after all she's been through, she knows that the heat in her core should be from  _fear,_  but it's not. Because his hands may be large and callused, but they  _tremble_ , hovering over her breasts so carefully that she has to push forward into them and the look he gives her is one of  _worship_.

She licks the salt from the crook of his collarbone, presses her forehead against his own, and allows herself to find the redemption she has craved in the way he holds her.

-

The second time he leaves, she carries on, because she must, because she always does, despite the fact it feels like a betrayal and a loss and that night she finds it difficult to sleep because she just can't get her breathing quite right.

-

The second time he returns (with a packet of tiny seeds and an apology and then, when nobody is looking, a soft brush of lips against her temple) is the first time she thinks she might need him.

**Author's Note:**

> i am trash for these two. [come and cry with me](http://lovelynux.tumblr.com/)


End file.
